Feb 28, 2024
I had a long and worldwide carrier in tech, which comprised obtaining a PhD, doing research, being university professor, and working in the industry, including in big companies such as Samsung, Sony Ericson and Motorola.
But after this career I decided to open a brewery in France, which I kept for about 7 years. That was quite an experience in entrepreneurship. There was passion, it was a lot of work, contracts with supermarkets, but suddenly the passion was gone. This is the story of how all this happened and why.
I started to have contact with the craft brewing world while I was traveling and working in tech all over the world. My first contact (I didn’t even know craft beer existed prior to that), with which I also had a quite nice interaction back in 2000-2004, was Brewerkz, in Singapore, where I was working as an university professor. It was a brewpub.
A brewpub is a pub producing and serving their own beer on tap. The problem with this kind of business is that it requires an investment at the start that far surpassed my budget, and that it preferably has to offer food (it often also functions as a restaurant) which is more complicated to manage.
Brewerkz’s owner once told me that they didn’t sell too many bottles, because bottles were expensive and he didn’t want to compete with Tiger, an industrial brewery from Singapore that distributes beer all over Asia, and all over the world.
Although I understood his reasons, it quite didn’t make too much sense to me at the time, since craft beer is not meant to compete with industrial beer. My thought was that craft beer had a different market, rather oriented to beer “connoisseurs.” I should have listened to him.
He also said a craft brewery was easy to build. It actually is easy, but it’s even easier if you have the budget and all you do is to manage. It’s another thing when you do it yourself, from buying to installing the equipment and doing the electrical installation of the whole brewery.
I couldn’t complain, though. It was a huge experience and in the past I had studied electrotechnics in a technical high school before starting my undergraduate studies in the university. Therefore, to me that was easy too. But you have to stop being an “orchestra man” at some point, mainly for the lack of time.
I resigned from my latest position at Sony-Ericson, at Lund, Sweden, around 2011, and returning to France by car, I passed by Brouwland, a brewing equipment company in Belgium, to buy my first 100 L brewing equipment. I started small to learn how to brew, to bottle, to develop recipes, etc.
Once the learning period had finished and my first recipes developed, I bought a 500 L mashing tun, that also worked as a filter, and kettle. It was an expensive and complex piece of equipment, but important to start quickly. It uses an internal tank with electrical resistances to heat pressured water in a closed circuit. This water circulated through the double walls of the mashing tun with the help of a furnace pump, heating the mashing tun’s content indirectly. That was good since it wouldn’t burn the malt.
Most of the equipment was bought from Brouwland, including a chiller and the double wall fermentation tanks. Some other equipment was bought elsewhere, notably a whirlpool made in Italy.
The whole setup was a bit complicated to use because of the lack of a real kettle. First, with filter installed in the mashing tun, one would pour the water and once the good temperature has been reached one would add the grinded malt to the water. Then the mashing tun would automatically mix and heat to the several other levels of temperatures that the recipe required. Once this was done, one would extract the wort from below the filter and pump it to the whirlpool (used here as an auxiliary tank). One would then clean the mashing tun, by taking the grains off, and removing the filter right after. Once cleaned, the wort would be transferred from the whirlpool back in the mashing tun. Now, the mashing tun was going to function as a kettle and the wort would be boiled for 2 hours. One would transfer the boiling wort back to the whirlpool, install the pump in closed circuit from the bottom to the nozzle of the whirlpool, and start whirlpooling for 45 minutes. The wort was then pumped from the whirlpool nozzle (not from its bottom) to the fermentation tank, where it was cooled by ad-hoc methods until 60°, when one could switch to the chiller to cool the wort to 20°, when finally one could pour the yeast to start the fermentation.
But I have ignored one important advice Brewerkz’s owner gave me in Singapore. I used 33 cl bottles, thinking they were not that expensive. With time, another detail started to become annoying. Bottling beer under pressure is also extremely time consuming and complicated.
It was not only the big bottleneck of the whole process. It was also extremely expensive to automate. I was facing a huge dilemma: either investing huge amounts to automatize it, or to sell the whole thing and let it go.
I started weighing other “minor” problems before deciding.
A fact I didn’t know when I started, and that I haven’t heard people talking about anywhere, was that beer is an extremely fragile product. One spends a lot of energy to keep it in low temperature to conserve it intact. Also, IPAs keep their fabulous flavor for ~3-4 months only.
A very experienced colleague I had in Toulouse would keep his beer at 1° C, for example. This would mean I would also have to invest in powerful air-conditioning to keep the whole brewery cool at about ~15°-18° C (to “save” energy) and more powerful chillers for the beer tanks.
The big disappointment was with IPAs, my preferred beer style. You have to brew it in really small batches because of its short life time. All the flavors are gone after 4 months. It’s a product you need to produce and sell quickly. But who can control supermarkets shelf time?
This would mean to check every supermarket you supply and substitute the ones that are “passing the date” by new ones. Not only you had to constantly brew them in smaller batches (preferred with a smaller mashing tun/kettle set), but you would constantly lose unsold beers.
And I don’t even tell you the headache it would be to prove to the authorities controlling alcohol products that those bottles were lost. I personally knew the local authorities. They were no troublemakers. But people that were elsewhere in higher ranks were particularly nasty.
I wrote a countability and stock control software that would automatically generate the forms (in Excel) to declare the amounts brewed and sold and to calculate the tax amount due. I would bring the reports to the local authorities personally and I didn’t have any problems with them.
The amounts would be the same but for different beers and that would tally exactly with the number of bottles sold. But that was totally unrealistic, since no batch contained the same volume. But the authorities don’t understand that. They wanted to see “round numbers”.
I recall an ex-colleague who would periodically receive “their visit” because the volumes declared were simply chaotic (normal in craft beers). Therefore, I had to solve this puzzle somehow to avoid having “visits”, paying fines, etc. But that was no fun and a constant headache.
If you brew a small batch with a 500L mashing tun, they just don’t believe! Why would one do that, right? Same time, same work, practically the same energy, for much less volume? Why? Well, remember the IPA story? Yes. That would mean a whole new equipment only for IPAs small batches.
The list of additional investments to advance the business to the next level had significantly increased and the shock of IPAs having such a short life was disappointing. Also the number of craft breweries in Toulouse was always increasing and the region was not really a typical beer market, as in the north of France.
People there would consume cheap wine, even though Toulouse is not a wine producer anymore. There used to be minor wineries in Toulouse’s periphery. Not anymore. The nearer wine producer now is about 50 km away, at Fronton. Even in the past, wine would probably mostly come from Bordeaux, and transported by boat through the canal du Midi.
Thus, in order to increase production and to justify all the investments, my beer would have to travel much longer distances and compete with many other local breweries. Or it would have to be commercialized in Paris, the real good market for this kind of beverage.
That’s when it came to my mind what the wise Brewerkz owner also told me in Singapore, that he didn’t want to compete with Tiger. Suddenly it all started to make a lot of sense. Indeed, industrial beer has 80% of the beer market. It’s strange to think about that, because craft beer is so much better. Why people still buy industrial beer in such a huge amount? It’s simple: because it’s cheaper. It’s cheaper because everything is done in huge amounts. Prices of bottles are much cheaper when one buys millions of bottles. Ingredients are cheaper because they are of much lower quality. Industrial beer is less susceptible to spoil because they are filtered and pasteurized, while craft beer is alive and susceptible to drastic temperature changes.
Obviously, it was not worth expanding the business. Maybe if I had switched to cans, instead of bottles, as every craft brewery in North America has done, it would still worth pursuing. But now the passion was gone, and the lesson was learned.
New passions are ephemeral and old loves die hard. I’m now back to tech, my true old love.